The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith

Remember when Arlo Guthrie told us the story of Alice’s Restaurant (with full orchestration and five part harmony) just so he could tell us another story, this one about his day down at the draft office? In one level, I thought about that tell-one-story-to-tell-another routine while reading this. Not that such an angle is a bad thing. Just the way my brain operates sometimes.

FYI: the plot summary I prepare will be full of holes. To fill in the holes would spoil the numerous reveals for future readers. I’ll redact important facts.

It’s three years after the Child 44 affair. 1956. Leo is head of a homicide department in Moscow, but its existence is secret because to admit its existence would admit that the crime of murder, an obviously capitalist crime, happened in the evolving Communist order. Leo is called to a crime scene that involves a former colleague.  Then another is killed. His former boss kills his wife and 2 children before taking his own life.

In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, Khrushchev writes a speech that essentially bares the evils of the Stalin regime telling the populace that the policies of hate will no longer be accepted. Political prisoners in the gulags are being released and many, rightly, hold grudges so the increase in retaliations against the former secret police, which Leo used to work for, should not be a surprise.

Leo and Raisa’s oldest daughter, Zoya, has been kidnapped by a street gang (a voya), headed by the wife of Leo’s first arrest of Lazar, a priest. Anisya was pregnant when she was arrested and her child was taken from her. Now called Fraera, she comes out of the gulag as a revolutionary intent of taking away from Leo what had been taken from her.  A simple trade: his daughter for her husband.

Leo and Timur (his partner at homicide) go undercover on a prison transport ship headed for a Siberian gulag to get Lazar (no details, no spoilers. This segment of the story is incredibly intense).

Back in Moscow, the exchange goes wrong and I’ll just leave it at that (again, to say more would be venturing into spoiler territory.

That was the first story that had to be told for the second story. 

The scene shifts to Budapest. Fraera is prodding the Hungarians into revolt against the Russians and helps lead the revolt. Leo and Raisa are there looking for Zoya as the revolution explodes with first the revolutionaries backing the Russians up only to be brutally put down by overwhelming Russian military force.

Sorry about the redacting above. Had to be done to avoid spoilers for both books. Personally, I thought this was the equal to, and maybe even a little bit better than, Child 44 as this one seemed to be more forcefully paced. It appears to me that the overall theme of this trilogy (Agent 6 is the third, next up on my reading list) is Leo’s attempt at redemption for all his wrongs committed while he was part of the first Soviet secret police, just after WWII.  He had done so much to so many innocent people that Leo tries and tries and tries to redeem his own sense of humanity only to keep suffering setback after setback. This isn’t 3 steps forward and 2 steps back – it’s more like 1 step forward an 5 steps back as the pendulum of Moscow’s own attempts at distancing itself from Stalin lead to a confused, paranoid, and vengeful citizenry.  I’ve been trying to come up with a turn of a phrase to describe this series and the best I can say about it is that while this falls under either the ‘thriller’ or ‘mystery’ category, the word I would use to describe both books is ‘intelligent’. This series (so far) is not for everyone. These 2 books are intense, violent, suspenseful, depressing, and extremely unsympathetic to most all the principle characters, the time, and the postwar Soviet society. Various supporting characters are introduced and carefully developed into critical roles only to meet an unexpected and untimely death, putting Leo (and ourselves) further away from redemption for crimes of the past. 

FALL FROM GRACE by Richard North Patterson

FALL FROM GRACE by Richard North Patterson is a psychological drama about a dysfunctional family on the island of Martha's Vineyard.  Adam Blaine is working as an undercover CIA operative in Afghanistan when he is called home to attend the funeral of his estranged father.  Ben Blaine was a famous and charismatic author but not a good husband and father.  He was fond of sailboats, good wine and women other than his wife.  His demise occurs by falling off a cliff with too few clues to definitively prove accident, suicide or murder.  Even though Adam had no contact with his father in 10 years, he is named executor to a will that left $12 million to Ben's latest actress mistress and $1 million to Adams's high school girl friend.  Ben has disinherited Adam's mother, uncle and older brother.  Adam enlists his CIA training to attempt to disprove his family's involvement in the supposed murder and reclaim the estate for his family.

With the help of two old family friends, a lawyer and a psychiatrist, plus a reporter, Adam clandestinely investigates his father's death.  Adam is forced to reconstruct events of the last ten years on Martha's Vineyard that he had missed.  In doing so he uncovers much older and more powerful family secrets of betrayal, resentment and strange relationships that give several individuals reason to hate his father if not give them a motive for his murder.  Adam skillfully manipulates the facts to favor his family even after discovering he was betrayed by them as well.

This is the first Richard North Patterson novel I'd read in a while and now I remember why he's not on my A list.  While the plot has a compelling appeal, the characters are not endearing or even that likable.  I found myself not really caring about them or the outcome.  Take a pass on this one.  There's lots better stuff out there.

Dial "M" for Man by Orrie Hilt

20something Hob Sampson is struggling to carve out a life in 1950s as a TV repairman outside of NYC. He's got a no account friend named Ben, a sometime girl Kathy, and a hard on for this blond he spotted in a bar.

She's the wife of Ferris Condon, 40yr her senior, builder of homes and substandard apartments. Years ago, Ferris tried to bribe Hob's dad, the town's housing inspector, but failed. Now Ferris is on the bank's board and when he learns that Hob wants a loan to buy the building he's in and to start up a new venture known as 'cable' nixes the application.

Ferris's wife Doris is one hot dish and needs a TV repaired and starts to put her charms on Hob and Hob being young and horny falls hard even to the point of hurting genuinely decent Kathy. Doris knows Hob is an easy mark and convinces him to kill her husband so she can gain access to his money so they can high tail it to California.

Pulp. Pure pulp. This came to me from the publishers of MRB fav Charlie Stella as part of a the Stark House Sleaze Classics (2 Hilt books in one binding. Other title is The Cheaters). Orrie Hilt was fueled by coffee and cigarettes and churned out novels on his manual typewriter. Today, we get excited when a favorite writer puts out a book a year (can you spell  Lee Child?). In his prime, Orrie turned out paperback pulp every two WEEKS. Orrie's list of titles contains about 150 books under his name or a couple pseudonyms, including writing as a lesbian author. Actually pretty entertaining. A definite departure from our normal fare and a bit of an education in pulp noir.When I'm waiting on the library, I'll probably check in on The Cheaters for another dose of pulp.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

It’s postwar Russia. Stalin’s new world is paradise. No crime because everyone is equal . . . no wants . . . no needs . . . Crime is the band of capitalism and just doesn’t exist in the new worker's paradise . . . verified by the communist regime.

Leo Demidov is a poster boy for the new Russia. A hero of the Great Patriotic War. His smiling picture aboard a flaming German tank was frontpage news. Now he works for internal security. His boss wants him to sweep the death of a colleague’s young son under the rug as a tragic accident with a train. While looking into another odd problem, an ambitious subordinate executes a couple farmers in front of their children, and Leo calls him down-hard.  Now Leo has a problem about who can he trust. This is Stalin’s Russia, where the office line of state security is “Trust, but check” that has since become “Check on those we trust.”

Said subordinate plants a rumor that Leo’s wife is an enemy of the state. All Leo has to do is denounce her, but he doesn’t. Instead, Leo and his wife are banished to a nothing outpost working for the local militia, the lowest form of human because these are the ones who handle most of the local dirty work for the State. Lucky for Leo. Others have been executed for less.

In this factory town, a child’s body is found, string tied around the ankles, naked, crushed bark stuffed in the mouth, and the stomach dissected out. Similar to how his colleague’s child was found. Leo wants to look into it but his new chief is dead set against Leo possibly finding something. If he did, the local militia would look incompetent because they just executed the main suspect. Incompetence is not tolerated; right up to the top and incompetence is a sure ticket to a gulag.

A third child is found in the forest of a neighboring village. A tense standoff with his chief ends with the chief reluctantly agreeing to investigate, but only very quietly, very off the record. But this is hard in a country where “the most important thing was a person’s relationship with the state” in a country that does not acknowledge capital crime and certainly doesn’t communicate between towns and other local governments.  Some careful and quiet investigative work reveals 43 such deaths, Leo’s colleague’s son was number 44.

This is a first rate police procedural set amongst the fear and paranoia rampant in the lowly citizens of Russia. Smith’s debut expertly portrays a citizenry that figuratively lives looking over both shoulders at the same time. It takes only a suspicion to be sent off and tortured, only to get a bullet in the back, of the head or a lifetime in a gulag. How could one live there in that time? It was a worker’s paradise, the Russian government told us it was. Seriously?   

FYI, Child 44 has been optioned to Hollywood (no timetable yet) and is part 1 of a trilogy about Leo Demidov. Part 2 was picked checked out of the library yesterday. And it's based on a Russian serial killer named Andrei Chikatilo, aka The Butcher of Rostov, who killed 52 women and children between 1978-1990.

The 500 by Matthew Quirk

Recently graduated lawyer with a bit of a checkered past lands a sweet job at a high powered firm who pays off all his bill, expects 100hr a week until he finds out their real clients are mostly crooks. Oh wait, that’s John Grishman’s The Firm.

No Mitch McDeere here. It’s Tom Ford. Kid thief whose goal as a lawyer is to earn enough money to pay off the medical bill of her cancer-stricken mom. Where’s dad? In jail (remember, McDeere’s brother was in jail). Ford gets a job with a lobbying group in Washington. The goal of the boss is influence with and over a shady group known as The 500, the 500 most powerful movers/shakers around.

Ford displays considerable talent at getting information that can be used as ammunition to get most anything through Congress or not through, depending on what's best for his boss. His skills get him promoted pretty quickly, right up to a move by his boss to steer a couple congressmen and a supreme court justice to modify some laws that will make it possible for a Serbian war criminal access to the US. Fords issue is whether he should “Die in infamy, honor intact or live in glory, corrupted.” What to do . . 

Sounds a lot like The Firm, right? And Hollywood has picked up on it, too. This debut book by Quirk is a very fast read written remarkably similar to the style of early Grisham, which wasn’t all bad. Doesn’t break any new ground, but is an easy way to spend a few hours with a kick ass legal thriller.

Ammunition by Ken Bruen

Bruen is not just Jack Taylor, he also has a series about London inspector Tom Brant. While Taylor has his own demons, Brant is just generally a dislikable character who is probably lucky someone, crook or cop, hasn’t shot him.

But someone does during what appears to be an attempted robbery in a bar, but the perp here is a hired gun, so it appears to be a hit.  Few people are feeling sorry for Brant. Meanwhile, newly promoted Sgt. Falls is being harassed by a recently released con she put away and staging a set up to help raise her standing with the suits upstairs. Things are worse than they seem as the con and Falls had a brief lesbian fling before a guilty verdict got in the way.  Constable McDonald is on a coke and alcohol fueled spiral who takes on the plight of a bunch of senior citizens who want to take back their street from druggies. But when one of the old guys dies in the midst of helping McDonald keep the peace, McDonald’s life falls ever faster.

Bruen is an MRB fav and his minimalist presentation can be a welcome relief to other authors who put forth 100 speaking parts in multilayers stories; straightforward and direct - perfect. When I’m in the need of a book to read while I wait for something to become available at the library, I know Bruen will deliver the goods. Not his best, but far from his worst.

The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

I’ve ventured off-genre to this nonfiction work about one of the great crimes of all times, the ascension of Hitler to power during 1933 and 1934. Eric Larsen, author of The Devil in the White City, wrote a story about the first U.S. Ambassador to Nazi Germany, William E. Dodd and his daughter Martha. William Dodd was the chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago when he was offered the post of Ambassador to Germany. He was not FDR’s first choice for the position, nor the second, and he had never previously served as a diplomat. In Chicago, Dodd had a rich intellectual life and was surrounded by such people as Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder, and Dodd was in the midst of writing a definitive history of the American South. But, Dodd was frustrated that his own career had stalled and he was ready for a bigger adventure.

Hitler had already ascended to the position of Chancellor, but with President Hindenburg still alive, Hitler had yet to consolidate his power – but that occurred early in Dodd’s four-year tenure in the post. Dodd was not from the wealthy elite types who were usually given such posts. Rather, he was stodgy, frugal and professorial, and he was looked askance by many in the State Department. Meanwhile, 24-year-old Martha, who was escaping from a dead marriage, had significant sexual appetites which she exercised indiscriminately, scandalously. As the result of one of her trysts with a Russian, at the same time her father was serving as the ambassador, it appears she became a minor agent with the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.

There were some remarkable accounts of the face-to-face contacts between Dodd and Hitler, and even one between Martha and Hitler. While the book spanned the life of the Dodd family, the primary focus was just one year leading up to Hitler’s first major purge known as “The Night of the Long Knives” on July 13, 1934, which was only a few weeks before Hindenburg’s death. When Hitler triumphantly accepted responsibility for the purge of what must have been hundreds of people, all killed or sentenced to die within a 24-hour period, Larsen wrote that Hitler was received with resounding cheers from the populace of Germany. Over the years, I had come to the opinion that through the mid 1930s, Germans were largely ignorant of Hitler’s evil doings, but Larsen would have us believe otherwise. And, even after the deadly purge, there was little condemnation that came towards Germany from the rest of the world. Larsen wrote that this purge was “one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement. Initially, however, its significant was lost. No government recalled its ambassador or filed a protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.”

One of the themes that Larsen put forward was that the U.S. was more concerned about not offending Germany so that the country would continue to repay it’s WWI debts to many U.S. creditors. But Dodd knew that repayment would not happen since Germany did not have the money to do so. Larsen asked what was so terrifying that Roosevelt and other world leaders did not stand up to Hitler sooner, and he suggests that the behind-the-scene bankers had much to do with that. This was a good read, as well written as Larsen’s wonderful book about the Chicago World’s Fair, and it consolidated my own understanding of the events in Europe in the pre-WWII years.

Eyes of Prey

This is the fourth Sandford book that we’ve reviewed, the third in the Prey series. I thought the beginning was a bit pedestrian, as he wrote in his first sentence, “Carlo Druze was a stone killer.” But, the book got better from there. Druze, a psychopath and low-life, is befriended by another psychopath who leads the high life. Michael Bekker is a physician, specializing in pathology, who also has a fascination with the process of death and a fear of being seen by the eyes of the already deceased. Sandford does have a talent for going to the dark, bizarre, and sadistic crimes, and in this case, the killers cut out the eyes of the person that was killed, even if it means going back to an already buried body to dig it up, just so the final mutilation can be done. Bekker is into polypharmacy at a level that would impress Hunter S. Thompson, and he teams with Druze to kill the two women that they both hate. For Bekker, it is his wife, Stephanie. For Druze, it is Elizabeth Armistead who runs the theater where Bekker makes his living – not an easy thing for an actor who looks like a troll. He holds Armistead responsible for not giving him better roles. But, the plot becomes more complicated and more deaths ensue. As in the earlier Prey series books, detective Lucas Davenport is given the case and he gives chase to the few meager clues. The book is an easy and entertaining vacation read, one that you just might read to pass the time on your next airplane flight.

Lie in the Dark

MRB has previously reviewed three Fesperman books, and the comments have all been favorable. I didn’t think this one lived up to the others. Talk about dark? Well, the title should have given me a clue. It takes place in war-torn Sarajevo where the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are all killing each other. Despite all the murders that are war-related, police detective Vlado Petric is assigned to investigate the murder of Esmir Vitas, Chief of the Interior Ministry’s special police. The murder was designed to look like a sniper hit, one like the many that were occurring around the city on a daily basis, but Vlado quickly figured out it was not just a random shooting. Fesperman probably captures how miserable it must have been to live in that city with all the atrocities that were going on. Day-to-day living was very difficult, so most of the characters were just struggling to survive. But, the plot and characters just did not grab me, and despite hanging with the book for more than 200 pages, I gave it up – just was not interested in seeing how it worked out. Amazon gave it a 4 ½ out of 5 rating. I disagree, but I’m willing to take on another Fesperman at some point based on The Prisoner of Guantanamo.

Pillars of the Earth

Although I’ve all read Ken Follett before, it was a long time before we started the blog. But, as the result of another religious discussion, I was enticed into going back and having another look at Follett. It’s a tome, a vacation read. It took me a week to finish, and it was an enjoyable week. The book has been well reviewed elsewhere, a 1989 book that became Follett’s most popular novel. He stepped out of his usual thriller genre for this very successful book. With only minor historical inaccuracies, Follett captured life in the 12^th century. The plot centered around the building of a cathedral in Kingsbridge over the lifespan of the main characters. Follett included King Stephen and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett (including his murder), but mostly this was the story of people of less high standing including peasants, outlaws, masons, and of course, the clergy and lower nobles who were vying with each other for position, power, money and influence. It’s a good book which fed my love for historical fiction. The quality of the writing was excellent. As I read the novel, I found myself thinking about how far we’ve come as a society since then, but also how little we humans have changed.

The Outlaw Album: Stories

East Coast Don has already written two favorable reviews on books by Woodrell, recommended by friend-of-MRB Charlie Stella. Woodrell has written eight novels which are mostly crime books based in the Missouri Ozarks in a style Woodrell calls “country noir.” I typically don’t like short story collections, but that what this one is. I’ll echo ECD’s remark that the writing is powerful, especially the dialogue that captures life in the Ozarks. “Noir” is the right word since “dark” would hardly capture the nature of his writing. The characters are disturbing and real. I’m intrigued enough that I’ll soon dive back into a Woodrell novel, perhaps Winter’s Bone which was already reviewed by ECD, a 2006 novel which was adapted into a movie in 2010 that got four Academy Award nominations including best picture, or maybe his second novel from 1987, Woe to Live On, which was adapted to a film in 1999, Ride with the Devil.